Mesosphere Scores $125M in Funding to Target IoT, Geo Expansion

Mesosphere closed on a whopping $125 million Series D funding round that more than doubled what it raised in its four previous rounds combined. The new funds pushed the company’s total funding to nearly a quarter-billion dollars since it was founded in 2013.

The latest round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates and Koch Disruptive Technologies. Other new participants included ZWC Ventures, Qatar Investment Authority, and Disruptive Technology Advisers. A handful of past investors also threw down some new money, including Andreessen Horowitz, Two Sigma Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert said the company plans to use the funds to target new markets around the world and new market opportunities like the Internet of Things (IoT). He noted that the IoT space is still ripe for new innovation around automated platforms to ease deployments.

“The opportunity gave us a chance to raise the capital so we don’t have to worry about raising any more anytime soon,” Leibert said. “It also gets our investors aligned with our vision and we gain access to new markets.”

Mesosphere’s past funding rounds included $2.25 million in seed funding back in 2013; $10.5 million in Series A and $36 million in Series B, which were both in 2014; and $73.5 million in a Series C funding round in 2016.

As a private company Mesosphere does not have to announce financial results. But it did note that it has nearly tripled revenues year over year.

The company competes against companies like Red Hat and Pivotal. Red Hat recently spent $250 million to acquire container platform provider CoreOS. Pivotal last month scored $555 million through an initial public offering (IPO).

Kubernetes, Portworx Integration

Mesosphere earlier this year added that deeper Kubernetes integration and other enhancements focused on edge and multi-cloud support. That move followed its announcement last year to support Kubernetes alongside its own Marathon container orchestrator within DC/OS.

Mesosphere CTO Tobi Knaup at that time said the move was about offering its customers more choices in terms of their container orchestration needs.

“It’s important for us to understand our target customers are usually the operations teams,” Knaup said. “These folks offer platforms for all the developers at a company sometimes serving up to 10,000 developers. They use a variety of software and can’t be limited to one option. Choice is very important.”

Analysts have noted that Marathon does lean toward larger container deployments. Knaup said some of Mesosphere’s customers are running several clusters with up to 30,000 nodes in each cluster.

Leibert said customers have so far been positive to the news. He noted that a Google engineer told attendees at a recent conference that the Mesosphere platform was the easiest in which to deploy Kubernetes.

According to a survey conducted last year as part of an SDxCentral report on container and cloud orchestration, Mesosphere’s Marathon was being used by just 18 percent of respondents. That paled in comparison to the 64 percent of respondents that said they were using Kubernetes and 36 percent that said they were using Docker’s Swarm orchestrator. Docker recently launched general availability of its platform with native Kubernetes support alongside Swarm.

Dan Meyer is a Senior Editor at SDxCentral, with a focus on containers, lifecycle service orchestration, cloud automation and DevOps. Dan has been covering the telecommunications space for more than 17 years. Prior to SDxCentral, Dan was Editor-In-Chief at RCR Wireless News.

New Report: 2018 Future of the Converged Data Center

2018 Future of the Converged Data Center is available for free download. In this FREE Report, find out why CI and HCI are the hot new platforms in 2018, and understand their relevance to enterprise, cloud and service provider data centers.

About SDxCentral

Engage With us

This material may not be copied, reproduced, or modified in whole or in part for any purpose except with express written permission from an authorized representative of SDxCentral, LLC. In addition to such written permission to copy, reproduce, or modify this document in whole or part, an acknowledgement of the authors of the document and all applicable portions of the copyright notice must be clearly referenced. All Rights Reserved.

Please enter your Business Email to view this asset:

We are requesting you provide a valid business, education, non-profit or government email address not from free or temporary email providers or ISPs. If you feel that our filters are incorrectly disallowing your email, please contact us at support@sdxcentral.com.